


Overture

by futurerae



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Depends on how you look at it, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hanging Out, Inspired by Music, Music, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 13:05:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5498033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futurerae/pseuds/futurerae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's funny, how you can watch someone learn and grow and become remarkable by inches, never really noticing how far they've come until you're slapped in the face with it on some rainy Thursday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overture

**Author's Note:**

> The music that inspired this, and which i envision Marty playing here, is this amazing acoustic revamp of the BTTF theme, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQj6LxJTEQY&feature=youtu.be

* * *

An idle afterschool Thursday in springtime Hill Valley; rain batters the roof and walls and ill-fitting doors of the garage at 1646 JFK. A soaked denim jacket is hanging off of the bedpost across the room, the best place they could find to dry it in this nest of clutter, and Marty figures his parents will take one look at the downpour and know why he's not home. _No big deal_ , he'd insisted a few storms ago, and they're not really interested enough to push.

"Looks like…" Doc says, squinting at the board in front of him, eyes rolling up a bit while he does the calculations in his head. "84 kilo-ohms."

Marty nods from where he's perched on the arm of the sofa, tray of parts balanced precariously across his knees. He picks through the resistor cups in all of their chaotic disorganization. "Tolerance?"

"Oh-point-five should suffice."

Okay. Grey, yellow… what order do the multipliers go in, again? It's either orange or green, and he huffs in annoyance at having forgotten this _again_.

"Marty?" Doc asks, mild and unhurried. The iron hisses when he leans across his work to clean the tip.

"Right, sorry." Grey, yellow, green, green. Executive decision. He hands the part across, drums his fingers on the edge of the tray while Doc inspects it.

A thoughtful noise, not at all chastising but Marty still knows: he got it wrong. "This is actually 8400 kilo-ohms. You're looking for—"

"Orange, right." He has that one picked out too, hands it across. "Sorry, I'm still having trouble with the multipliers."

"It's a tedious code to memorize. Most people just use a reference card, which I know I provided you with." Doc sets the work down for a moment, raises his eyebrows. The smile he offers is warm, and as usual, Marty feels something clench somewhere under his ribs. "And which you stubbornly refuse to use."

"Well, I, ahhhh…" he trails off, gesturing over the tray with one hand, the motion a little desperate. "It feels like cheating, you know?"

Doc narrows his eyes, contemplating. He eyes the way Marty's jogging his leg slightly, making the contents of the tray shift and rattle; he takes in the taut lines of his posture on the edge of the armrest, and Marty finds himself biting on his lip under the scrutiny.

"Marty, are you doing all right?" Doc finally asks, reaching out to set one hand on the edge of the tray before it spills. "You seem…. tense, today." Then, because Marty is always a little tense and they both know it: "Perhaps more so than usual."

"Yeah, I don't know, Doc." Shrug. Fly casual. "Just sort of restless? Nothing to worry about."

The hand on the tray curls around its edge now, lifting it away. "You've been helping me with this for an hour now—you should consider taking a break." He nods toward the amplifier, suggestion clear, and normally that would be a _great_ plan, really perfect, except.

Except he took the Chiquita home with him yesterday, to work on a problem with one of the tuning pins. It'd been a trivial repair, kids' stuff, and it's currently in perfect working order. It's _also_ currently on his bed at home, the least useful possible place for it.

He shrugs, letting himself slip back from the armrest onto the cushions. Flops flat onto his back and sums the problem up thusly: "No axe."

A quiet _hm_ , a pause, then a scraping sound cuts through the air—the stool's legs against the concrete of the floor. Then the sound of rummaging, of boxes being shifted and objects being tossed aside. Marty narrows his eyes at the ceiling; he reaches up with one hand to grasp the top of the sofa, then leverages himself up to peer over the back of it at all of the ruckus.

"Hey, hey Doc," Marty says, a little worry slipping into his voice when he sees something sort of big and fragile looking and VERY sharp go sliding down the side of Mount Clutter. "What are you—"

Then Doc turns, triumphant, holding the single most neglected, junky acoustic guitar Marty has _ever_ seen.

"That's…" Marty says, taking it when it's offered because what's he gonna do, just leave him there holding it? "Well, it's… a guitar, I guess."

"Not your preferred style, I know."

"No, hey, it's great, Doc." He strums experimentally, wincing at how out of tune it is, how brittle the strings. "But what's it even doing here, you don't play…"

A dramatic exhale directed straight upward, and Doc looks around the room, as if noticing the mess for the first time. "I don't play the saxophone either, at least not recently. You know me, Marty," he says, grinning widely—one of those explosive, heart-and-brain-melting smiles that Marty's convinced know exactly what they're doing. "I never throw anything away."

 _I_ _f I think it'll prove useful,_ Marty hears unspoken, and he works his mouth soundlessly for a second or two before settling on simply, "Thanks."

"It's nothing, Marty." Doc settles back onto the stool, tugging the tray of parts closer. "If you can get the wretched thing back in tune, feel free to use it whenever you like."

Yeahhh, Marty's not so sure about the possibility of that one, at least not without some fresh strings; he's also got his eye on a spidering of cracks low on the body, emerging comically from under a piece of duct tape. Dropped at some point, maybe. "I'll try," he says, half laughing, and flops onto the sofa to make a go at it.

* *

Emmett knows that the guitar in question is in terribly rough shape, and he also knows that a neglected instrument is a sure way to break a musician's heart. But Marty is not just a musician—he's become a solid technician in his own right in the last few years, and there is no surer way to set _that_ sort of mind at ease than to give it something to repair and make whole again. In the end, it'd been the only form of distraction he could readily offer.

So he is surprised—pleasantly so, but still surprised—when, after only a few experimental plucks and a quick and dirty tuning, Marty starts picking out a few tentative notes. They're sharp and brittle sounding, scratchy almost, the old strings having lost most of their tensility; after a few louder notes resonate at just the right frequency to set both their nerves on end, Marty pauses. There's a faint plastic plink on the concrete, and when the guitar sounds again, it's with softer, warmer tones that meander gently over a few scales.

"The tuning still sounds a little off," Emmett remarks conversationally after a moment, fitting an inductor to the board and reaching for the soldering iron.

"Yeah," Marty says, audibly distracted. The scale he's playing fumbles a bit; no wonder, really. Emmett doesn't think he's ever seen him play without a plectrum, and any practice he might have had playing this way must be years out of date by now. "They're so fragile, I don't really wanna crank 'em too hard. Thought I'd just experiment with what I've got."

"Sounds like a reasonable plan."

Then the notes collide in a jumble, a collision of fingers into one another, and Marty sighs loudly. Stops, for a moment, to rearrange how he's got his hand positioned, and when Emmett turns to look, irritation is in every motion, every line of his posture.

"Marty," he says.

Marty cranes his head back over his shoulder, looking for just a moment every inch the stripling kid Emmett had met three years ago, taking his first lessons and mad with frustration. "Yeah?"

"Relax, Marty. Experiment, like you said. It doesn't have to be perfect. You know I'm not the most critical audience, or the most discerning."

Marty nods, once, unconvinced. Then again, more solidly, and turns back to the guitar.

After another few scales—and Emmett thinks he knows what Marty's doing, mentally mapping out what each note sounds like in this oddball tuning, which is tremendously impressive in its own right—a melody starts to emerge, something entirely unlike anything he's ever heard Marty play. It's neither a cover of any of the songs he's been learning to play with his band nor any of his original compositions. The notes come slowly at first, almost delicately, and as the rust sloughs away and Marty seems to gain some confidence, the music picks up speed and begins to take on more complexity. The notes layer over one another, multiple threads of melody rolling into one another at times and at others splitting back apart, meandering around a core progression and then cresting to quiet crescendos.

Emmett doesn't realize at first that he's stopped working, that he has been sitting here with his head canted to better hear the music and the soldering iron forgotten in his hand, for at least thirty seconds. Forty-five. A solid minute. When he does, he hurriedly sets the iron into its holder—it'd do no good to burn down the garage _too_ —and as the piece reaches a particularly stirring crest, lets his eyes slide closed. Lets himself be simply swept away by it, like an ocean tide that is both gentle and vividly, intoxicatingly blue.

After another stretch of time—Emmett couldn't say how long, really—the music abruptly peters out. When he opens his eyes, he finds his gaze locked with Marty's, staring at him with that same ocean tide in his eyes.

"I didn't know you—", he starts, then reaches to set the guitar against the side of the couch. "I wasn't trying to distract you, Doc."

Marty's worries are as layered as his music, but that's no revelation. Emmett reaches to pick up the board he's working on, just one of many that will need to packed into the time circuit display. When Marty had asked what it was he was building, he'd replied, with an utterly straight face, that it was just a new kind of clock. It hadn't _really_ been a lie, but.

"I can honestly say, Marty, that I have never resented a distraction less." He turns the board over in his hands, checking for cold solder joints with the ease of old habit. "What was it you were playing?"

"Aah, nothing specific. Just sort of improvising."

Emmett allows himself the rare luxury of a slow whistle. "Very impressive, then. It certainly _sounded_ composed."

"Really?"

An affirmative noise, and Emmett reaches for another resistor. "It was reminiscent of a more narrative form of music—almost symphonic, with all of the threads running through it. It evoked the image of a young person about to set out on a remarkable adventure far from home, one in which he will learn a great deal about himself, perhaps, or save the life of the one he loves—a classic and somewhat cliche story, I'm sure you can agree. But as with all things, it's really in the execution, the emotion brought to it, and—"

And Emmett cuts himself off, becoming acutely aware that he's essentially writing Marty a book report on his idle composition, and none of this is what he really wants to say.

"Marty," he says after a beat of hesitation, turning back around on the stool to face his friend directly. "You really have become a _phenomenal_ musician."

Silence—dead silence, but for the clocks all ticking away.

"Ah," Marty says, reaching up to rub at the back of his head. "I mean…" he trails off, and his voice is thick with self-consciousness or something else, a sudden flush blooming across his cheeks.

Emmett doesn't reply or look away; he just gives Marty the time he needs to process the sentiment.

"Thanks," Marty finally says, overwhelmed and awkward and honestly sort of beautiful for it. "That, ah, that kind of means _everything_ , you know?"

"I didn't know," Emmett says, tapping the corner of the board on the bench and smiling through the matching rush of flattered embarrassment. "But now that I do, I'll make sure you know what I think more often."

On the wall behind him, a few of the clocks chime out the three-quarters hour. The sound of rain on the roof is barely audible as the storm subsides; it's nearly six in the evening. Marty hauls himself out of the cushions, gives an exaggerated stretch that fails to make him seem any taller than he is.

"One of these days," Marty says, wandering over to the worktable, "You'll have to tell me what this is. You said a clock, but I don't really buy it."

Of course he doesn't; wrong number of digits in the wrong arrangement to be any sort of pure chronometer. Emmett eyes the metal casing with its LED displays, dark and dead at the moment, and thinks of the swell of the music as it hit that last crescendo, the way it'd swept him along through the third act climax and drifted into a quiet denouement. He finds his fingers tracing over the display's faceplate, thumbing the rough, sharp edges.

"One of these days," he says, turning his head to regard Marty steadily. "I'm sure you'll find out."

* * *


End file.
